Maternal and Paternal Divine Genealogy

A philological distinction Kerényi preserves in The Gods of the Greeks: Hesiod, when narrating the generations before Zeus’s overlordship, “especially emphasises and extols their maternal origins,” while Homer, when mentioning the same figures, “believed Zeus to have been Kronos’s eldest son” — that is, attended to paternal descent. Both grammars survive in the Greek sources. Neither was rejected. The scholar must hold both.

The distinction is not anthropological housekeeping. It registers two distinct imaginations of divine origin operating simultaneously in the same tradition: a matrilineal grammar in which the Titanesses (Theia, Phoebe, Rhea) are the named bearers of the great divine lines, and a patrilineal grammar in which paternal succession — Ouranos to Kronos to Zeus — carries the story.

Kerényi’s mention of the duality is brief but load-bearing. It names, at the level of sources, the double-rooting of the Greek pantheon: chthonic-maternal on one axis, Olympian-paternal on the other. Jungian readers of Greek religion inherit this duality as the double ground of the archetypal field: the neumann-great-mother is not displaced by the sky-father; the two structures coexist in the theogonic narration itself.

Relationships

• theogonic-procession
• neumann-great-mother
• hesiod
• homer

Primary sources

• kernyi-gods-greeks (Kerényi 1951, chapter on the Titans)